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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   29421 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 31, 2023

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DeBoer, in this essay, does not claim that we should use money to reward people for being good. He claims that we should ensure that even stupid and untalented people still have some minimal level of material comfort. He does not seem to mention anything about them being good or not.

His main point, I think, is that equality of opportunity is not sufficient to bring about a world in which everyone has that minimal level of material comfort. Which, really, is pretty obvious. Maybe there are a few people who have never thought about the matter before or who are extremely ideologically blinkered and so do not realize it but for the rest, DeBoer's essay just states something obviously true. I am not sure why he felt like spelling it out.

Your idea of focusing on better social outcomes is an interesting one, however. It provides some form of justification for allowing practices such as inheritance that are anti-meritocratic. In defense of inheritance, one could argue that letting parents pass on their wealth to their children encourages the parents to work harder and thus leads to better social outcomes overall.

He claims that we should ensure that even stupid and untalented people still have some minimal level of material comfort.

To what end?

Hedging against your own redundance in the face of increasing AI capabilities

I think he would see it as a terminal value. Frankly, I agree. The idea that some people are born into a society in which they are permanently denied even the most basic living standards because they had the poor fortune to be born stupid in a knowledge economy is unconscionable to me.

But ~0 people fit such a definition. Basically everyone can secure employment in our economy that provides basic living standards. What it doesn't provide is a guarantee of access to luxury locations, or luxury goods.

Except stupid, untalented people in developed countries do have a minimum standard of living, unless they just make cartoonishly terrible decisions. And the latter category is mostly the mentally ill, criminals, drug addicts, etc. Now it’s true that welfare and charity are the mechanism for this minimum standard of living, and that this is no doubt humiliating for many people who have done nothing wrong except for being below average in every respect. And it’s equally true that there are people who slip through the cracks, mostly through fault of their own. But at a certain level we have to stop pretending there is any good solution to those two problems- you can’t make psychotic people act rationally, that’s what ‘psychotic’ means. And of course people who can’t provide for themselves will often find it humiliating to be provided for, but you can’t fix that either.

Except stupid, untalented people in developed countries do have a minimum standard of living, unless they just make cartoonishly terrible decisions.

Replace 'cartoonishly terrible decisions' with 'decisions they are manipulated into' like spending their money on fast food, building credit card debt, financing cars at ruinous interest rates, and you quickly see how it's quite difficult for these people to handle themselves in the modern economy.

You may say 'oh well those are stupid decisions they deserve it,' but the fact of the matter is that they are being manipulated into these bad decisions by much more intelligent people. We cannot expect them to have the intelligence or discipline to ward it off. Basically predatory high-IQ businesses that fuck over poor people are extracting rents and creating huge negative externalities for the rest of society through their business models.

People with credit card debt, car payments that are too high, wasteful spending habits, or payday loans are in modern developed countries mostly not starving to death in the streets, or living rough, or what have you. America and Europe just don’t let people starve. Yes, there are many people who are manipulated into making bad decisions that adversely affect their quality of life, but these people still get to avail themselves of a minimum standard of living unless they’re cartoonishly poor decision makers.

Honestly I'm not even against the whole idea of just handing the hopeless poor a small warm apartment, three healthy meals a day, a Netflix subscription, a decent sized gaming computer and some pocket money every week to spend on whatever takes their fancy as long as they acknowledge that they are beneath the people who actually toil to produce the stuff they are getting given and swear to just STAY OUT OF THE WAY! while the rest of society is out there propelling mankind to greater and greater heights. Literally all someone would have to do to avail themselves of this would be to sign a declaration saying they are irrevocably checking in for X period (where X ranges from 6 months to the rest of their lives, as they see fit) to be treated as a ward of the state.

Providing all this for free would probably be cheaper than the untold billions being wasted today trying to maintain the illusion that low quality humans are just as good and useful in modern society as high quality humans if only they are given the right push.

Are you also going to give them medical care? "Yes" is unaffordable, and "no" makes it into a horrible deathtrap.

If we instead just ask, "How much medical care are you going to give them?" then there are plausible answers. After all, bandaids are medical care that you could give them. So is, like, free MRIs for anyone with a slightly sore wrist. Of course, the American polity is allergic to the very concept of this question most of the time.

This is a special case of the general problem people have when being pinned down into agreeing to how much is "enough" to give someone a "basic existence", but it's special in that people have been overly conditioned to view healthcare as a binary, either you "have it" or you "don't have it" thing. Compare e.g. food, where most people make their own choices on a regular basis about how much food they buy, what quality, etc. There, people are at least likely to have the capacity to engage in a discussion about how much food (quantity and quality) is "enough", even if there is sufficient heterogeneity to prevent meaningful political solutions.

Let me rephrase: Any level of medical care that would be affordable would make it into a horrible deathtrap.

Bear in mind that we can't afford to give everyone food, housing, clothes, and pocket money with or without medical care, unless we're living in Star Trek. The only reason this is even slightly plausibly affordable is that there are a limited number of poor people. I'm skeptical that there are so few that we could afford to do this. Medical care just makes it orders of magnitude worse.

And that doesn't even consider problems like "what if everyone, as soon as they retire, signs up for the poverty program so they get their medical care paid for".

If we instead just ask, "How much medical care are you going to give them?" then there are plausible answers.

They're utility monsters. They will essentially hold themselves hostage for whatever you have, and more. Unless you're willing to, at some early point, say "fine, die then" (and the US is demonstrably not so willing), they will consume ever-increasing amounts of resources.

Of course, the American polity is allergic to the very concept of this question most of the time.

I actually like this plan, my only worry is that way too many people would do this! Perhaps we can pull it off in another 10-20 years.

Oh, go chase yourself. A Netflix subscription is consumption, which your economy is founded on. Take that away, let Netflix and the other companies crash, and see how much "propelling to greater and greater heights" goes on.

If you want to argue that people doing pure research with no immediate 'how do we monetise this?' results should be 100% funded, I'm happy to go along there - but the funding will dry up if there is no money being made. And who makes the money? The engines of consumption.

And who are the majority of consumers? Those you call "low quality humans":

Here those strange entities, the Thrifty Housewife, the Man of Discrimination, the Keen Buyer and the Good Judge, for ever young, for ever handsome, for ever virtuous, economical and inquisitive, moved to and fro upon their complicated orbits, comparing prices and values, making tests of purity, asking indiscreet questions about each other's ailments, household expenses, bed-springs, shaving cream, diet, laundry work and boots, perpetually spending to save and saving to spend, cutting out coupons and collecting cartons, surprising husbands with margarine and wives with patent washers and vacuum cleaners, occupied from morning to night in washing, cooking, dusting, filing, saving their children from germs, their complexions from wind and weather, their teeth from decay and their stomachs from indigestion, and yet adding so many hours to the day by labour-saving appliances that they had always leisure for visiting the talkies, sprawling on the beach to picnic upon Potted Meats and Tinned Fruit, and (when adorned by So-and-so's Silks, Blank's Gloves, Dash's Footwear, Whatnot's Weatherproof Complexion Cream and Thingummy's Beautifying Shampoos), even attending Ranelagh, Cowes, the Grand Stand at Ascot, Monte Carlo and the Queen's Drawing-Rooms. Where, Bredon asked himself, did the money come from that was to be spent so variously and so lavishly? If this hell's-dance of spending and saving were to stop for a moment, what would happen? If all the advertising in the world were to shut down tomorrow, would people still go on buying more soap, eating more apples, giving their children more vitamins, roughage, milk, olive oil, scooters and laxatives, learning more languages by gramophone, hearing more virtuosos by radio, re-decorating their houses, refreshing themselves with more non-alcoholic thirst-quenchers, cooking more new, appetizing dishes, affording themselves that little extra touch which means so much? Or would the whole desperate whirligig slow down, and the exhausted public relapse upon plain grub and elbow-grease? He did not know. Like all rich men, he had never before paid any attention to advertisements. He had never realized the enormous commercial importance of the comparatively poor. Not on the wealthy, who buy only what they want when they want it, was the vast superstructure of industry founded and built up, but on those who, aching for a luxury beyond their reach and for a leisure for ever denied them, could be bullied or wheedled into spending their few hardly won shillings on whatever might give them, if only for a moment, a leisured and luxurious illusion. Phantasmagoria—a city of dreadful day, of crude shapes and colours piled Babel-like in a heaven of harsh cobalt and rocking over a void of bankruptcy—a Cloud Cuckooland, peopled by pitiful ghosts, from the Thrifty Housewife providing a Grand Family Meal for Fourpence with the aid of Dairyfields Butter Beans in Margarine, to the Typist capturing the affections of Prince Charming by a liberal use of Muggins's Magnolia Face Cream.

He claims that we should ensure that even stupid and untalented people still have some minimal level of material comfort.

I'm not convinced that his point is this simple. First, stupid and untalented people do have some minimal level of material comfort in every rich country around the world today. You could argue that it's not enough comfort or that it leaves out people who are psychotic (and children of people who are psychotic) or who have other problems much larger than "lack of talent" but then it becomes mostly a question of what is the necessary "minimal level of comfort." Second, and more importantly, I have never, ever heard someone who argues for "equality of opportunity" say that they want stupid/untalented people to not have some minimal level of material comfort. This seems to fundamentally misunderstand the debate about "equality of opportunity" vs "equality of outcome." If this is Freddie's whole point then it's like weighing in on an argument about taxation to say that we shouldn't execute people who don't pay their taxes. It's fighting a complete strawman of a position. Third, deBoer is an avowed socialist, of the pretty-much-a-communist type and I'm not convinced he doesn't favor a pretty radical program of wealth redistribution.

DeBoer, in this essay, does not claim that we should use money to reward people for being good.

At the very least, he seems to think that most people arguing for equality of opportunity think this. Otherwise it's hard to explain this line: "Core to that whole conception of justice is the notion that talent and hard work are something inherent to the individual or under the control of the individual." My point is that, no, that notion is not at all core to the argument for "equality of opportunity" and also, the best argument for "equality of opportunity" is not really about "justice" in the way that people normally use the word.

In defense of inheritance, one could argue that letting parents pass on their wealth to their children encourages the parents to work harder and thus leads to better social outcomes overall.

I agree that this is a reasonable argument for allowing inheritance (and for not taxing it too heavily). It's also an argument easily overlooked by people too invested in the "virtue theory of money." The children who inherit their parents' money did not do anything virtuous to earn it so (some people think) why should they get it?

First, stupid and untalented people do have some minimal level of material comfort in every rich country around the world today.

So yes, this is true to some degree. But as I mentioned before they are manipulated into' like spending their money on fast food, building credit card debt, financing cars at ruinous interest rates, and you quickly see how it's quite difficult for these people to handle themselves in the modern economy.

Effectively while the poor do have a minimum level of comfort, they need more protection from rapacious capitalists who see them as cattle to be exploited. The underclass are consistently manipulated and coerced into ruining their own lives, and we sit back and do nothing to stop it.

Do you want to make stupid people wards of the state, including having their decisions made by the state? Because that's what it would take to keep them from making bad decisions. You cannot protect them without confining them.

No, as a start I want to stop credit card companies and other financial entities from knowingly pursuing people they don't think will pay them back and will likely struggle with debt. I know that's kind of the business model, but I think it's evil.

We can absolutely do more to protect the consumer - look at the reforms in mortgages after 2008 for instance. It's not a binary where we either take away all the freedom of the underclass or give them maximal freedom. We find a balance between the two.

As long as your laws do not distinguish between stupid people and everyone else, this is basically just making everyone a ward of the state. As long as they don't do that, your "balance" results either in everyone being restricted as is appropriate for the stupid, or the stupid being unprotected from things the not-stupid don't need protection from.

I am far from convinced that regulators can actually protect stupid people from getting taken advantage of by clever marketing tricks- attempts to prevent alcohol and tobacco advertising to teens have been a dismal failure because alcohol and tobacco companies made ads disguised as psa’s against teen drinking and smoking that were more effective than just running normal ads, for just one example.

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